Content Tagged ‘place’

Ecotone’s tagline is “reimagining place,” and we love work that brings us to a specific location, real or imagined. In this department, Save Your Place, we highlight our favorite descriptions of place from work we’ve published at Ecotone and Lookout.

“Alma’s downtown storefront windows are unlike any other windows in the world. It seems that you can’t really look through them. When you try to, they instead appear to frame your entire existence in some as yet unnamed ghostly dimension no one has ever defined. There’s no way to escape the gravity of the reflections in these windows, no way to elude what they have in store for you, how they seem to do the work of X-rays connecting the living and the dead in a continuum that goes on forever.”

Ecotone’s tagline is “reimagining place,” and we love work that brings us to a specific location, real or imagined. In this new department, Save Your Place, we’ll highlight our favorite descriptions of place from work we’ve published at Ecotone and Lookout.

This place is from Chaz Reetz-Laiolo’s story, “Animals” from Ecotone 15.

“Morning. Already ninety-six degrees. The far and staggered blue mountains wavered in the distance. The palm fronds had yellowed, even browned at the tips. The shadow of one of the Air Force jets tumbled crazed across the land and was gone. And none of them seemed to notice, save for Peter. The rest of them with flies walking delicately on their body hair. It was a sort of drunkenness they were into. They wondered aloud if the concrete between the roof tiles had always looked so cruddy. If the black cross on the tower was Episcopalian or Dominican. When was the last time that the bell tolled. It would have surprised them that there was anything beyond the crooked driveway that looked now like a river in drought.”

I’m curator of a thousand pieces of decaying artwork, including a few still-brilliant canvases, intricate miniatures, hand-illustrated broadsides, an unpublished (typed) book or two, posters, journals, sketches, all produced by someone dear and, yes, still near, nearer than ever.

I’d lived decades with a representative sampling of these tattered pen-and-ink drawings, oil and acrylic paintings, watercolors, and writings. Their titles: “The Discovery of California,” “You Don’t Have to Eat God,” and “In the Summer We Went to the Mountains.” All were made by the late Dr. Peter Carr of Laguna Beach, California. He was my Comp Lit professor, an activist, a larger-than-life fellow of small stature if terrific self-esteem who created in whatever medium he found handy. He scribbled, typed, drew, painted (even on cardboard and plywood), was perhaps a bit manic or only urgently, unceasingly productive. Just as well because he died, suddenly, in 1981 at age 56, no plan for any of it, not the life’s work, unpublished memoirs, anticipated triumphant gallery show, or incredible output. Thirty years later they came to me.

Ecotone’s tagline is “reimagining place,” and we love work that brings us to a specific location, real or imagined. In this new department, Save Your Place, we’ll highlight our favorite descriptions of place from work we’ve published at Ecotone and Lookout.

This place is from Annie Proulx’s essay, “A Yard of Cloth” from Ecotone 10.

“We drove west through the mist and damp. The light was a somber, northern gray, the road blurred with light rain. Fog hung over the Pemigewasset. On the outskirts of town the road widened. We were alone on the highway. My sister was reading a letter. We came into the broad, sweeping curve that follows the river’s course. In front of us, skewed across the empty road in the smoking-gray silence, were two smashed gray cars, pillars of steam rising from each, the road a fine carpet of glass.”

Ecotone’s tagline is “reimagining place,” and we love work that brings us to a specific location, real or imagined. In this new department, Save Your Place, we’ll highlight our favorite descriptions of place from work we’ve published at Ecotone and Lookout.

“What a thing it is to see moonlight on the tips of saguaros. A dusting of backlit snow. And the Catalina Mountains, dimensional at sunrise, crevices and folds articulated in light and shadow—flattening into a stage set by evening, gradient purples and blues becoming uniformly dark against the darkening sky.”

Ecotone’s tagline is “reimagining place,” and we love work that brings us to a specific location, real or imagined. In this new department, Save Your Place, we’ll highlight our favorite descriptions of place from work we’ve published at Ecotone and Lookout.

This is from Cynthia Huntington’s poem “Boletes in September” from Ecotone 15.

“Home is knowing how the land can feed you, he said. He had / known hunger. And now I wander, out the fire road giving way to sand / where the dunes open and trees part to sky.”